4 Main Inequalities of Testing and Debugging Procedures

by Nataliia Vasylyna | August 17, 2015 8:56 am

Quite often during interviews in the software testing company applicants are asked about the difference between testing and debugging. Most often, beginners admit the typical mistake by claiming that these two concepts denote the same thing.

However, anyone wishing to work in the software product testing field is required to understand that testing and debugging are different as night and day. In a nutshell, debugging is the work for programmers and developers who perform this procedure before the product gets into the hands of a testing team.

Testers, in turn, perform functional testing[1], installation testing[2], configuration testing[3], and so on, trying to find errors missed by the developers in order to send reports on these errors for further correction.

Main Signs of the Difference Between Testing and Debugging:

1. Testing must often be a pre-thought-out, carefully planned process (of course, except such types of the check as ad hoc testing[4]) while debugging is characterized by better efficiency under intuitive and experimental conditions.
2. Testing does not require understanding the internal structure of the program in detail – debugging is only possible with a thorough knowledge of the “innards” of the system.
3. The testing process can often be automated – if not completely, then at least in part, but the debugging process does not foresee the automation.
4. The main task of debugging is to discover the cause of the bug, and the main task of testing is just the detection of an error and sending it to the developers for determination of its cause and fixing.
5. Testing always starts with known conditions and debugging starts from possibly un-known initial conditions.

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Source URL: https://blog.qatestlab.com/2015/08/17/testing-debugging-procedures/

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